Paddy Donnelly

Wanna know what Japan is up to?  Tokyo Tuesday is the place to be!

“Let’s jump right into this: Japan has the absolute best census in the history of my known world. Not only does it include normal things like age, sex, and the height of each of your pets, but it also legitimizes the gossipy question of What Are You Doing Right Now? Japan slapped a bunch of people with notebooks and a sacred Numbers Mission: keep a log of what you do during the day, in fifteen minute intervals. And those people did!”

This visualization project is the work of Soma, from Brooklyn, and looks at the everyday life of the Japanese people.  Do you want to find out just how many women with part-time jobs are walking their dog at 3am?  This project will tell you with the help of some lovely colourful graphic timelines.  The design is perfect, really simple and, even though it’s difficult to figure out exactly whats going on from first visiting the site, you are drawn into the project and persevere to find out the intricacies of this project.

Its projects like this this which encourage me to kick start my own vis projects, while giving me bucketloads of inspiration at the same time.  Another different approach to visualization is Toby Ng’s World of 100 project, one of the simplest vis projects I have come across so far.  A series of posters which shows various statistics based on the premise that if the world were a village of 100 people.  The posters have a variety of images which are split in some way to show the different statistics.

I must admit that I did chuckle when I saw the image for the sexual orientation poster.

Some striking images and so well excecuted.  I have now got a range of ideas for my visualization project.  I had originally planned on pursuing a more computer/coding based project but the World of 100 project has shown me that it could be much much simpler and still have a dramatic effect using my Illustration skills.  It is often the case that I over complicate things so the inspiration from this project should make me think clearer.

A couple of other Visualization sites which inspire me include Infosthetics [Above], which explores the symbiotic relationship between creative design and the field of information visualization, and TweetStats [Below], which shows you just how addicted you are to Twitter.  I’m getting there but not quite on Stephen Fry’s level yet :)